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GEP SMART vs SAP Ariba Procurement comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
661
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
GEP SMART
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Procurement Software (3rd), Contract Management Software (8th)
SAP Ariba Procurement
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Procurement Software (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
it_user1709418 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Product Manager at a university with 10,001+ employees
Doesn't require a background in analytics to run reports
SMART has been helpful for sourcing and public bids. For regulatory purposes, our university posts bids, depending on the scope of the bid. We get a lot of value out of SMART's ability to post to a public site and have suppliers see that information, register in the tool, and participate. SMART features for collecting information and its timeline capabilities are highly useful. Then on the contract side, the reporting capabilities are the most valuable. Our use case focuses primarily on post-execution and lifecycle management, so it's essential to be able to report accurately especially compliance-related reports. SMART is easy to use, especially when reporting. It isn't designed for a hardcore analyst. You don't need to have a background in analytics to run reports, which is huge. I realized I hadn't touched too much on the spending side, but we use SMART for all spending analytics, and any commodity manager procurement professional can go in and run a spending report. That was a business decision to restrict who can run reports since that data can be exported and used. But the reporting capabilities are incredibly easy to use.
Argy Soudi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Procurement Consultant at Ps digital tenders limited
Has connected procurement and contracts efficiently while setup and support still require improvements
Support could be faster for critical issues with SAP Ariba Procurement. When patching happens and new releases come out, it can be hit and miss, though mostly it remains reliable. The on-time response is 99.9999%, but the main issue over the years has been with releases and patching. The initial setup of SAP Ariba Procurement is not straightforward. We have been trying to set it up for two and a half years for the council I work with. The personal account login is ready-made and allows landing page adjustments, but the overall software implementation can take forever and requires multiple teams to work on it.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We have been able to take resources that have been doing manual work and putting them into more productive work."
"The technical support is good. If it is required that they provide their resources, they will send their resources to your organization to support you in terms of development and technical support."
"Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten."
"Basically, to be frank, most of the features are awesome."
"The control room is the best part as everything can be seen and controlled from there, scheduling storing of credentials, and much more. I have used PDF extraction and other tools where data needs to be extracted and it works great at that part. I highly recommended this tool for automation."
"The biggest benefit of Automation Anywhere is that it makes our processes error-free. Accuracy is how you build efficiency within the system and increase productivity."
"We work on SAP as well as many other internal platforms, and this solution can very easily be moved between them."
"With Automation Anywhere, they receive their financial statements while still on the call."
"The spend module is really amazing and lightning-fast. It can give even the most novice of analysts access to the information needed and the ability to tweak it the way they want to see it. It has a lot of flexibility."
"The source-to-pay functionality has contributed to the digital transformation of our company."
"One of the most valuable features is the opportunity-identification through the spend analytics. Another is around the RFX options to benchmark various pre-qualified vendors that are invited to participate."
"It's a huge efficiency tool and it has really accelerated our ability to drive the procurement business case in terms of cost savings."
"It's user-friendly, in terms of the design of the tool."
"From a contract perspective, in my opinion, SMART has improved things a hundred-fold."
"The digital transformation and people being able to search and the reduction in redundancy are all part of the efficiency and process improvement, from our perspective, and there's a huge benefit to it."
"The fact that GEP is a single, unified software platform for our whole organization certainly unifies the information in one place."
"The best thing about SAP Ariba Procurement, in comparison to a lot of its competitors, is that if the company has someone who knows how to configure it, they can do a lot of the process building themselves."
"SAP Ariba Procurement has impacted my organization in many important ways that have been prolonged benefits."
"We made custom enhancements to suite our business process."
"I like the guided buying features."
"SAP Ariba's Sourcing cloud based solution has the greatest quantifiable ROI of its solutions, which typically occurs within the first six months after acquisition for most companies."
"Salesforce provides me with the ability to create reports based on various parameters."
"Ariba allows us to manage our suppliers seamlessly."
"The PunchOut functionality is fantastic as it makes shopping very easy."
 

Cons

"It could be improved in terms of the global analysis of all the issues caused by the dependency components. For example, if bots are running on virtual machines on Microsoft Windows 2019, sometimes an issue might come from the virtual machine. Automation Anywhere should work closely with Microsoft or any other editor with which there are some issues occurring and stopping the bots from running properly."
"There were times in the past where through submitting a ticket for support, it seemed that some of the engineers who were helping me did not understand the product that they were supporting. That felt difficult because I felt I was almost explaining the product to the company."
"The debugger is also a weakness of the tool, forcing the developer to use error handling or message box to map errors. Few applications take more time for loading when integrated."
"Additional features should involve the Cognitive Section where we need more Advance solutions involving ML & AI."
"Reliability and error handling should be improved."
"The assign value function is not there in the A2019 Community edition, which makes it hard for a developer to manipulate the data."
"As a developer, I would like to have copy commands available from one bot to another."
"The Recorder action in the A2019 Community edition is not supported."
"There are no mechanisms for them to check up on how they refresh their data. So oftentimes, when we go into the tool and we don't see something, we alert them and they say, "Oh, the data hasn't been refreshed, so we'll go ahead and refresh it," and then what we're looking for pops up. We should not have to be the ones to tell them they need to refresh. There should be a mechanism in place for that."
"We had a lot of challenges and disagreements with SMART. It's been a long road, for sure, on the contract side."
"I want to see continued investment in analytics and reporting."
"We had a lot of challenges and disagreements with SMART. It's been a long road, for sure, on the contract side. There is a little bit of pushback on their part when we need stuff done. Things aren't done very efficiently. I'm still waiting on some changes that were requested well over a year-and-a-half ago."
"I'd like to see drag-and-drop reporting. They have the old model for reports where you have to click the "run" button. The thing runs and then you have to export it to PowerPoint."
"Tech support could use a little bit more work."
"Their contracts module is kind of clunky and It took a while for them to correct some of the basic functionality, some of the "Contract Management 101" functions, but it seems to be coming around. It wasn't working the way we'd expected."
"Quite frankly, we're tired of informing GEP. They should be scrubbing from the left and right and from top to bottom to make sure that anything that they're releasing is fully tested."
"SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem."
"On the sourcing, it could be easier to import the documents you want, so if you want items to be bid on, it could be a bit easier to import that from a spreadsheet."
"They should make the solution more user-friendly."
"Ariba Procurement tends to integrate best with other SAP products and is harder to work with if you have non-SAP products in your architecture."
"Gaining access to the sourcing project by the supplier needs improvement."
"The SAP portion of the procurement is not always obvious or user friendly."
"I would like to see more reports coming out of Ariba and more insights because it has to work in connection with SAP. So unless I run SAP and Ariba, I have to run. I am not able to see the utility of Ariba."
"Integration: SAP Ariba's integration has not matured yet, there is lot of scope for improvement in terms scenarios, error handling, data update intervals, etc."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am not responsible for the pricing part, but I know the pricing is competitive compared to other tools."
"There are a lot of savings in terms of effort and time as well as costs. Automation Anywhere automates a lot of processes. It allows an organization to save the efforts of a lot people. It saves a lot of time because people can't work a whole day (24/7), but Automation Anywhere bots can."
"The cost for scalability is much cheaper than developing a new system."
"When I started working on it, it was difficult to obtain a trial version (barrier to entry). Now, they have a Community Edition, which may make it easy to get started."
"Annually, we are paying almost one million reais."
"On a scale of one to ten with ten being the most expensive, I rate the price of Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten."
"The licensing cost for Automation Anywhere is high."
"Automation Anywhere is competitive... Pega is somewhat comparable, but Pega also requires a lot more infrastructure and a lot more experience to get up and running."
"My advice is to think wisely when it comes to estimating the number of licenses that you will require. If you settle on a number too early and you need additional ones, then the extra licenses might be quite expensive."
"If our organization could use it as a full-fledged solution, then it would be valuable and give a return on investment. However, since we are not currently using it as a full-fledged solution, even facing some bugs and problems with the synchronization with some of the internal software, we are not able to use it in a full-fledged manner."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The licensing cost depends on the customer."
"The license is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business161
Midsize Enterprise82
Large Enterprise558
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
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What needs improvement with SAP Ariba Procurement?
At the moment, I don't have any specific reasons for improvement areas in SAP Ariba Procurement. The main improvement...
What is your primary use case for SAP Ariba Procurement?
I am a customer of this tool, and I use SAP Ariba Procurement for my regular procurement roles. This software is used...
What advice do you have for others considering SAP Ariba Procurement?
In managing supplier relationships and mitigating risks, SAP Ariba Procurement has a very strong role to play. It giv...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
SMART by GEP
Ariba Procurement
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Exxon Chevron Macys
Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT)
Find out what your peers are saying about GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.